


The New Girl

by sunalso



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, F/F, Green Chile, Santa Fe, dog park meet cute, it's hard being the new girl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-16 04:03:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15428601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunalso/pseuds/sunalso
Summary: AU. Daisy's got a new job working for SHIELD Security in Santa Fe, NM. Her first Friday in town isn't very exciting, but at least her pup is making new friends at the local dog park, which is the last place Daisy expected to meet someone so interesting.Beta'd by Gort!





	The New Girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stjarna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stjarna/gifts).



> Lady in this fic is based on my own rescued Chihuahua. She's my icon on tumblr  
> [@sunalsolove](https://sunalsolove.tumblr.com/) (search Lady on my blog and there's at least one pic!)

It was Friday.

Which should be party day. Daisy had gone out every Friday while she’d been in college. It’d been a welcome break from the slog of classes and homework.

Now she was newly graduated from Berkeley. She had a real job, at an internet start-up in Santa Fe, New Mexico of all places. And she was exhausted. Her first week of work had been a non-stop whirlwind. At least she got to wear jeans and t-shirts and blouses to work instead of stuffy starched shirts with shoulder pads like most worker drones. Honestly, it was one of the reasons she’d decided to work for the company. The head of the startup, Phil Coulson, was the other. He’d promised that working for SHIELD Security, Inc. would be exciting.

He hadn’t been wrong.

Protecting data was labor intensive, even if she was in an office on a computer all day.

Being new in town, she also didn’t know anyone to go hang out with yet. There’d been some interesting guys and gals she’d met at work, but none of them had seemed like potential dates. At least not yet.

Daisy sighed. She was slouched on her second-hand couch in the tiny apartment she was renting. It had local flavor, which meant it was old and cramped, but it had a courtyard and a stucco exterior with a tiled roof. All of which were cool.

She kicked off her pumps, put her feet up on her battered coffee table and tilted her head back. Netflix and wine sounded like a perfect date.

There was a very loud whine from beside her.

Daisy cracked open her eye as the whine repeated. Her dog, Chase, was sitting there and looking morosely at her.

She’d found Chase on the side of the road, collarless and starving, as she’d driven from California to New Mexico. He was a bona fide mutt, about fifty pounds. The vet she’d taken him to had said he didn’t have an identification chip and had given him a clean bill of health. The dog was probably a cross between a German Shepherd and some kind of spaniel, maybe. It was hard to tell. He was tan, with a pointed muzzle and floppy ears. And the biggest heart.

Chase had adopted her as much as she’d adopted him. He slept on the floor beside her bed, a true guard dog.

At the moment, he was looking at her pleadingly. He whined again.

“I’m tired,” Daisy whined back.

Chase was unimpressed. She knew he needed a walk.

Daisy stood and yawned. Walking was overrated. She stuffed her feet into sneakers and smoothed down the front of her bright pink blouse. As she went to grab a bottle of water from her embarrassingly empty fridge, she was confronted with the address of a dog park one of her coworkers had given her.

Perfect.

Chase could run to his heart’s content, and she could sit on her butt and catch up on her friend’s Instagram feeds.

Water and phone in hand, Daisy clipped a leash to Chase’s collar and led him out of the apartment. Her beat-up Toyota Corolla, the blue paint faded and chipped, was parked at the curb. Chase jumped in the backseat and lay down, tongue lolling, as Daisy sat behind the wheel and punched the dog park’s address into her phone.

The drive only took five minutes, and Daisy was surprised to see the sheer number of cars parked in the lot adjacent to the dog park. The place was beautiful, with benches and tables under tall cottonwood trees. Chase was bouncing with excitement as Daisy let him out of the backseat and opened the gate to the fenced-in park. Dog of all shapes and sizes were running, playing, and barking.

It was a lot louder than Daisy had been expecting. She let Chase off his lead, and he bounded away, ears perked and tail wagging.

Daisy found an empty bench off to one side and sat. She did her best to divide her attention between scrolling through pictures her college buddies had posted and keeping an eye on Chase in case she needed to clean up after him.

Chase barked, played, and ran like crazy, obviously thoroughly enjoying himself. Daisy sighed at a picture of a friend standing inside her incredibly perfect apartment in San Francisco that some company was shelling out the big bucks for. Maybe Daisy should have been less choosy about what job she took. She glanced up at the sound of laughter to find Chase circling a petite woman with short, dark hair.

Chase sped off, but Daisy couldn’t look away from the woman. Her smile was blindingly beautiful, and her face had a mischievous cast to it, as if she knew all the best ways to both get into and out of trouble. Her clothes were a simple t-shirt and jeans, but they clung to all the right places. Daisy’s cheeks heated up when she realized she was staring. There was just something about the woman, something magical, that made Daisy want to sit down and find out all her secrets.

“As if,” Daisy muttered, looking back at her phone. Her luck with girls was only slightly worse than her luck with guys. Her last boyfriend, Lincoln, had broken up with her and he might as well be dead for all she’d heard from him in the last six months.  

After another ten minutes, in which she managed to write three notes to friends on the photos of their perfect, interesting lives, Daisy stood and stretched.

“Chase!” she called, and he bounded over, only to immediately run off again.

Her phone chimed with an incoming call. Great. Work.

“Chase!” she yelled.

She answered the call and did her best to answer the questions of SHIELD’s hardware engineer as he grilled her about a program she’d written. One of their servers was acting up, and he was blaming her. Typical. It didn’t help that she had to mentally translate everything he said out of his thick Scottish accent.

Daisy clipped the leash to Chase’s collar when he deigned to trot back over, and maneuvered him out of the dog park’s gate and to her car. She opened the back door for him while she continued to argue with the guy on the phone. Leaning against the open door, she groaned as he launched into another rant.

After a few more seconds there was the muffled sound of the phone being pulled away and then Jemma, who was the engineer’s wife and was a liaison between different parts of the company, came on the line. “Sorry about that, Fitz gets a bit grumpy when he hasn’t eaten. He knows your program isn’t the problem now. And we hope you’ll join us for after work drinks one day next week.”

“Thank you,” Daisy said. Jemma really was a ray of sunshine. She supposed it balanced out her husband’s tendency to be gloomy. “And I’d like that. But no problem anyway, please call if there are any more questions.” She hung up and rolled her eyes. Didn’t either of them ever go home?

She shut the car door, got into the front seat, and started the engine. Great, she needed gas.

Daisy backed out of the parking spot and turned the wheel, gravel crunching under the tires as she headed for the exit. She hoped there was something good in her fridge for dinner, or at least something edible. Shopping had been a low priority. There might be nothing but a bottle of ketchup. Maybe it wasn’t too awful if she ordered pizza for a third time that week?

A figure darted out in front of her car, and Daisy screamed as she stomped on the break. Her car shimmied to a halt, thankfully not hitting whoever the person was. The figure looked up, and Daisy groaned. It was the cute woman from earlier, though now she wasn’t laughing. Daisy slumped forward and hung her head. Today sucked.

The woman came around the side of the car and tapped at her window, and Daisy rolled it down.

“Hi,” the woman said. “Can you not steal my dog?” Her brown eyes were as lively as the rest of her.

“I didn’t…” Daisy trailed off and twisted around to look in the back seat, where the woman was pointing. “Oh, crap.” Chase was lying there, tongue lolling, and between his front paws a round, red-brown chihuahua was sitting primly and wagging its tail. “Let me park my car,” Daisy said to the woman. “I can’t believe…ugh, I’m so sorry.”

The woman snorted and gestured for Daisy to do so as she stepped back. Pulling her ugly car into the nearest spot, Daisy got out and opened the back door.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I guess Chase wanted to bring his new friend home.”

“It’s okay. I’m just glad I was able to stop you in time. My name’s Piper, by the way.” She smiled, and Daisy felt a little off-kilter.

“Oh…nice meet…er, I-I’m…mine’s Daisy.”

Piper tilted her head back and laughed. It held the same charm as before. “Are you new to town, Daisy?”

She nodded. “I just moved here last weekend for work, with my dog, Chase.”

“Thought so, I hadn’t seen you here before. Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, and your dog. Mine’s Lady, who I swear I don’t overfeed, but she’s pudgy anyway.”

Lady let out an excited bark from the backseat at hearing her name.

“And just between you and me,” Piper said in a conspiratorial whisper, leaning close enough that Daisy caught a whiff of Piper’s perfume, which was something woodsier then most women wore. “Lady is kind of dim. She’s a rescue, and I didn’t think to give her an IQ test before adopting her.”

“But she’s so cute.” Daisy smiled at the chihuahua, who was still sitting in her backseat.

“She’s lucky she is. Otherwise, I wouldn’t put up with her,” Piper said. “Though now I love her and all her quirks. Once I care about something…” she trailed off and shrugged as her eyes darted down Daisy’s body and back up.

“That’s pretty cool.” Daisy felt a little daring because she was almost sure Piper had just checked her out. “Do you come here a lot?”

“Usually my friend—” Piper stressed the word friend and Daisy bit her lip as hope flared to life in her chest. “—from work, Davis, comes with me to the dog park with his golden retriever every Friday, and then we have burgers at my place, but the dolt has a date tonight. I…I don’t suppose you’d like to maybe have a green-chile…cheeseburger? With me?” Piper looked a little uncomfortable, and Daisy’s hope grew.

“Since I literally was thinking I might have to resort to eating ketchup with a spoon a minute ago for dinner, sure,” she said with a shrug.

Piper chuckled. “I’m glad I could rescue you from that.”

“It seems you make a habit of taking in questionable strays.”

Daisy thought she might have overstepped her bounds, but Piper just snorted, then she ducked her head and put a hand on Daisy’s arm. Daisy inhaled sharply at the contact. It felt like electricity was racing up her arm.

Piper pushed her bangs off her face. “I should sort of clarify that I’m also trying to have a date on Friday night if that’s okay?”

“Oh good, because so was I.”

They stared at each other, both smiling, for a moment. Until there was a high-pitched bark from Lady, followed by a deeper one from Chase.

“Bring your dog, too,” Piper said. “You’re both welcome.” She picked up Lady, and Daisy took Chase’s lead as he followed the chihuahua out of the car. Daisy locked it and followed Piper as she headed towards the sidewalk.

“Are you going to carry her the whole way?” Daisy asked.

Piper laughed. “Miss Lady is far too good to do something as mundane as walk to her home, aren’t you girl?”

The dog wiggled and wagged her tail.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Daisy said to Chase. She turned back to Piper. “Are you actually going to put green chiles on a burger?”

“You are new to New Mexico, aren’t you?” Piper raised her eyebrows. “Don’t worry. I’ll introduce you to all the best food. Just—" She nudged Daisy with an elbow. “Please don’t try to steal my dog again.”


End file.
